With the beginning of the new year, I decided to get ambitious and give myself a goal of writing 1.25 million words this year. I’m counting everything. Writing, personal and painting journals; every word written that has anything to do with any of the stories; even the words I write on this blog and the Horse Painter blog.
When I decided to count everything, I felt a little bit like I’d be cheating. Journals don’t have that much to do with writing stories, after all. Why should I count them?
But the goal was a word count production goal and, as Neal pointed out, writing journal entries does require words. So I’m counting everything.
Today is January 15. I’ve just closed Saving Grace for the day and will be moving on to writing something else when I finish this post. It’s nearly halfway through the month, so I thought I’d update the word count marathon.
So far this month, total word count is 67,015, for a daily average of 4,468.
The significance of that is that I calculated I would need to do 4,000 words a day every day but Sunday to produce 1.25 million words. The daily average cited above includes the one Sunday of the month because I sat down and wrote a lengthy prayer that day.
I’m astounded. That is a remarkable statistic, especially when I consider that over 41,000 of those words are on stories or are story-related. That’s much better than I expected. Much better.
It’s also encouraging because this week has been a tough one with Saving Grace. It seems like I’ve done as much going backward as forward and yet I can see in black and white that that’s not true. Not with the amount of words that have been written on that story.
I’ve had people tell me that keeping word count worksheets and setting goals for word count is counterproductive. It may be for some, but it is just the motivator I need to keep me writing when I don’t want to write or when I don’t think I have the time. Having a target to aim at makes doing the work that much easier.
My question at this point is: Have I set my target too low?
